For those of you keeping track at home, the answer is, “In a bar, alone, half-drunk, with Creed’s ‘Higher’ playing over the loudspeaker.”
The question? “What’s the lowest point in your life recently?”
The beer (Bass Ale) was pretty good, and the service (a Red Bull-fueled firecracker named Yasmeen) was just fine. Still, low was I. Not even in a Cracker, early 90’s alterna-hit sort of way. Flat out low.
So, for the second round, I ordered a 2nd Bass along with a pen and paper to write some thoughts down. Yasmeen returned with a pint glass, a pen, and 6’’ of blank receipt paper. And so I began to scribble. And what I scribbled will form the basis of what’s going down this week on the blog.
A lot of what I’ve been attempting here recently has been autobiography. Well, “attempted” is the wrong word. Implies a sort of conscious mindset about all this. Truth is, nothing that I write is ever conscious. I’m not a Gertude Stein automatic typist by any means. Just saying that when I sit down at my computer, the specifics of what I’ll write are completely unclear. A week’s worth of Boof essays were sprung from a chance reference that had been planted in my head by my brother the week before. And lo, 5,000+ words sprang from that over the course of the week.
Thing about autobiography, though, is that it’s inherently a rewriting. Post-modernists will tell you that there are limits to all knowledge, self-knowledge especially. The very idea of knowledge to extremists is tantamount to hubris. Even though I spend a fair amount of time with myself, there would be some who would say that it’s my hang-out buddy that I know the least of all. That I’d have a better chance of knowing the guy who sells me my morning paper at the local MBTA stop.
Rather than wallow in the futility such a mindset could incur, I’d rather embrace the notion of this rewriting. I hereby embrace all rewriting. I own up to it, and I flat out own it now.
I could tell you all about the events leading up to my placement in the Boston Theatre District Saturday evening, 5:07 pm, pen in one hand, pint in the other. About the hours spent wandering aimlessly through the streets of Boston, pushing through crowds on Newbury Street, going against the grain, seemingly the only one headed in my particular direction. Feeling a bit like Neo in the Red Dress scene of “The Matrix”. Milling through the aisles of a Virgin Megastore, seeing items I wanted but couldn’t afford. Being surrounded by people in various configurations of size, number, stature, vulgarity….happy couples, wannabe gangsta groups, old people hunched over the Classical aisle, ‘tweens nursing dripping ice cream cones outside of JP Licks. All varied, all lined up, seemingly endless arrays…just like the lines of 12 ounce barley and hops beverages lining the refrigerators behind the bar.
I could go into detail, but detail in this case simply isn’t important. And that’s where the notion of the conscious rewriting comes into play. The notion that I “owe” something to my readership is something that’s always bothered me. Something I’ve wrestled with. In a way, I don’t owe anyone anything, because it’s my website, it’s my words, and I can choose to say or do anything I choose. Be that as it may, as a writer, once I choose to publish something for public consumption, all of the above logic falls by the wayside. I in fact do owe you something. I do owe you truth in my writing. However, I do not under any circumstances owe you factual truth. I owe you emotional truth.
That is to say, I need not share with you how I got to be in such a low state at a Bennigan’s on Saturday night. It doesn’t matter, in the long run, if I was mugged, fired, had too little coffee in the morning, had a death in the family, or didn’t make the mile splits I had hoped for on my 10K run that morning. All of those details are, in the long run, irrelevant. I can cheat on those facts, especially if they make the story more interesting. What these details can and don’t do, however, is make the story false.
You can substitute “false” for “hollow”. I can’t invent something in my writing that cheapens the emotional heart or takes a shortcut to it. I have to earn that moment, and you as a reader are owed the purest, most direct, and most emotionally honest path that I can take. It doesn’t matter (or really, shouldn’t matter) to anyone if Jenny and I had broken up in her dorm room or atop Mt. Rushmore. The emotional aftermath for the two of us is exactly the same. I could have put the two of us in a flaming jet, headed for the Atlantic, and that’s OK, but if I then went on to describe how freakin’ happy I was to be free of her, than I’m doing everyone (especially the two of us) a disservice.
Like I said, there's two types of truths, and I'm only interested in one around her. I can have imaginary conversations with Jennifer Garner until I'm blue in the face (or, in this medium, blue in the fingertips). So long as there's an emotional truth underpinning my flights of fancy, it's still interesting and worthwhile. (And if it gets me an email from Ms. Garner herself, hey, score one for the bald guy.)
What I’m finding, as I write, is that people do in fact react to the emotional truths they find in what I or anyone else writes. The details of my life, and really, any writer who you don’t know personally, are seriously unimportant. What happens to me on a daily basis is flat out dull. It’s not worth discussing, and I certainly believe it’s not worth reading. There’s no merit there. But, in a fit of hubris, I do believe that what I can express on an emotional level indeed has worth, both from a writing and reading perspective. Those are stories worth telling, and those are the stories that I want to write.
With that in mind, you’re gonna see three more entries this week, published when they are completed. They too were sketched out on the piece of receipt paper Saturday night (I wrote really tiny). They will be three letters to three women who never existed. That is to say, the girl in question that I write to does not, nor ever will, be flesh and blood. But I have met her, and met many like her. And I have a need to talk to three of them. Three composites. Three people with whom I’ve never shared coffee but have shared my soul. Three people with whom I’ve done everything, both real and imagined. Women I miss, women I wish I had never met, and women I’m hoping to someday meet.
Some of the scenarios will be autobiographical, others will be fictitious. Then again, I’ve already stated how the two are far form binary opposites. What matters most is that I approach each of these composite fictions honestly, and then, and only then, will they be truthful. Not sure what will come of this experiment, but I’m kind of intrigued to see what happens.
Hopefully, a few of you will be as well.